The world's largest BitTorrent tracker is no longer running on Hypercube, the tracker originally developed by Anakata, one of the Pirate Bay founders. The Pirate Bay switched to Opentracker which uses less resources and supports UDP tracking.

The Pirate Bay had been testing Opentracker for a few weeks before they completely abandoned Hypercube. They have now switched to the new software on all their trackers, 16 in total.

We asked TiAMO from The Pirate Bay why they decided to switch to Opentracker, he told us: “Well it’s faster than hypercube and uses less resources. Also it supports UDP tracking which hypercube did not.”

Opentracker is a lightweight BitTorrent tracker which uses minimal resources (it runs fine on your WLAN router). The software does not store any data or log any IP-addresses and is more stable and efficient than most other tracker software.

The guys from Opentracker, once falsely accused of conspiring with the MPAA and MediaDefender, are the same guys who run denis.stalker.h3q.com. Their tracker was placed third on our list of 5 most popular BitTorrent trackers, but after Demonoid went down they moved up a spot. It is now the most frequently used BitTorrent tracker after The Pirate Bay.

At the moment, the Pirate Bay and denis.stalker.h3q together track more than 9.000.000 peers and 1.000.000 torrents. In fact, the majority of all the BitTorrent transfers are handled by Opentracker.

For those who are interested, you can check out the tracker statistics here.